Tacoma School District is speeding to make good on Proposition 1’s promises – and alarming some people who did not expect to see action so soon.
In February, Tacomans approved the bond measure, which will raise $500 million over 25 years, to rebuild or renovate 14 neighborhood schools and make health and safety improvements to all schools that need them.
In July, Tacoma Public Schools brought the dozers to Washington Elementary School at 3701 N. 26th St. in the Proctor District. They took down the 1949 additions to the original 1906 building designed by Frederick Heath, and they cleared the trees.
All that heavy equipment around the historic building came as a surprise to people who had not been following the neighborhood discussions on the school renovation. Some feared the school was being demolished, following the old Gray Middle School into rubble and recycling. Some did not connect a bond passed in February with renovations begun in July. We don’t normally get that kind of speed in government projects.
“This is our opportunity to show them promises kept,” said Stephen Murakami, Tacoma Public Schools’ director of planning and construction. It’s also a chance to display the transparency promised during the Proposition 1 campaign.
Because schools are so vital to the neighborhoods they serve, the district has hired Stacy Flores as facilities communication coordinator for the next eight years of renovations, remodels, demolition and construction. She will be maintaining a website at http://www.BuildingForAchievement.com, and she will be updating information on http://www.tacomaschools.org, facebook.com/tacomaschools and http://www.twitter.com/#tacomaschools. You can also call her at (253) 571-3350 with any question, comment or concerns.
Flores noted that one of the selling points for Prop 1 was the opportunity to roll remaining funds from a previous bond into the 2013 package at a more favorable interest rate. That money paid for planning on the Washington renovation, so studies, plans and permits were well along by the end of the school year. That head start means that work on Washington will likely be done by the start of the 2014 school year.
“I think it’s going to be a celebration of the historic structure,” Murakami said. “We will have three new additions wrapping around it in a very delicate manner. The way they connect is with glass hyphens. You will be able to see the old structure. You are using the same language, scale and materials.”
That’s a response to a school of thought emerging regarding historic buildings. Other school districts have faced criticism for jamming modern additions onto celebrated historic buildings, Murakami said.
“Some historians think that additions should be able to be taken off some time in the future, so anything we do should not take away from the existing fabric,” he said.
That applies mainly to the exterior. The interior spaces will be designed to fit modern classroom needs as part of the $28 million project.
The district will bring the same sensibility to the renovation of Stewart Middle School in 2016. It will likely step aside from that issue when the issue of Hoyt Elementary arises.
For years, Proctor neighborhood students have attended Washington-Hoyt Elementary School. Hoyt was built in the 1960s, and was one of the first modular plywood schools ever built. A model of it toured the world, including the former Soviet Union, so it has its own brand of architectural significance, Murakami noted.
As part of Washington-Hoyt, the once-modern building served kindergarteners and some first graders. Those youngest students walked the three blocks between the schools for the bus and for lunch in any weather. The arrangement had its charms. Many parents liked easing their five-year-olds into the big world of school that way.
The renovated Washington-Hoyt will bring all students onto one campus, adding a separate kindergarten building to the site. The Tacoma School Board will decide Hoyt’s future.
The location of that kindergarten building determined the trees’ future. The healthy ones were too close to it. Others around the perimeter were, at best, in fair condition.
All the trees have come down, to the dismay of some neighbors.
They’ve been part of the Proctor landscape for decades, and when an old neighborhood loses its established trees, people who love them feel the loss.
It’s an emotional situation, and it should be.
The right tree in the right place is a great asset to any city.
Tacomans recognize that and support, publicly and in their own yards, efforts to increase the city’s canopy cover to 30 percent.
By contrast, the wrong tree in the wrong place, and a sick, weak tree anywhere, is a liability. Any parent would hope that a school district would minimize the chances of a branch weighted down with wet snow would not crash onto a playground, or the bus stop.
The district did just that.
Tacoma Schools hired Favero Greenforest, a Seattle consulting arborist and certified tree risk assessor, to report on Washington’s trees in June 2012.
There were 37 – gingkos, Bradford pears, maples, pines, Douglas firs and a single elm – on the two-acre site. They’d survived bad pruning, downed branches, repeated toppings, root and soil compaction and summer drought.
The ginkos were a sad lot, Greenforest said, in poor and very poor condition.
The Bradford pears made up most of the 12 trees rated “fair.” Only 12, mostly evergreens, got a “good” rating, and they stood by the kindergarten site.
There was no room to rearrange the additions, said Murakami.
“This is the smallest site in the district,” he said. “At two acres, it’s a tiny site.”
When students return to Washington-Hoyt in September 2014, they will find new landscaping, including a teaching garden.
In the meantime, they, like the other students displaced during the bond projects, will attend Hunt Middle School.
The district is fighting the notion of a “displaced year,” Flores and Murakami said.
It is adding new furnishings and technology to Hunt Middle School, which will be called Transition Academy. It will house the curriculum instruction department, and introduce new ideas in teaching. It will, he said, prepare students for the opportunities and resources they will find when they walk into Washington in 2014.
If you want to follow Prop One’s progress, you can sign up for a Renovations & Construction e-Newsletter at http://www.BuildingForAchievement.com.
Prop 1 Construction Schedule
• Washington Elementary – July 2013-August 2014, $28 million.
• SAMI – December 2015-August 2016, $10 million.
• McCarver Elementary – June 2015-August 2016, $30 million.
• Wilson High School – April 2015-August 2016, $40 million.
• Stewart Middle School – June 2015-August 2017, $58 million.
• Wainwright Elementary – June 2016-August 2017, $30 million.
• Arlington Elementary – June 2016-August 2017, $28 million.
• Browns Point Elementary – June 2017- August 2018, $31 million.
• Lyon Elementary – June 2017-August 2018, $29 million.
• Birney Elementary – June 2018-August 2019, $32 million.
• Grant Elementary – June 2018-August 2019, $29 million.
• Boze Elementary – June 2019-August 2020, $32 million.
• Downing Elementary – June 2019-August 2020, $30 million.
• Hunt Middle School – June 2020-August 2021, $30 million.